God, I hate this time of year, when the Leaving Cert results emerge and feminists start preening and sneering, meanwhile complaining about the relatively lower incomes of mature women, as if the adult world were decided by the exam results of 18-year-olds.
The debate - such as it is, though the na-na-na-naa superiority competition that we are obliged to witness every August hardly merits the term - is bad enough, but it usually passes, in time. All that is needed is for us chaps to keep our noses below the parapet, and our powder dry, and all should be well.
Michael Buerk, the BBC newsreader, did neither, and now he's allowed the "debate" to turn nastier than usual. I was hoping it would stay on the British side of the Irish Sea, but this being August, and with almost nothing to write about other than the patent academic superiority of girls over boys, I was hoping in vain: Brenda Power weighed into Michael Buerk last weekend in The Sunday Times with the usual combination of personal abuse and withering sarcasm that any man who does not accept the party line on feminism can faithfully expect.
The last well-known British journalist to attack the role of women and feminism in the media was Neil Lydon 10 years ago. It was, in fact, a poor piece of journalism, both simplistic and exaggerated in its judgements, and poorly researched. It was but one article, just one, and we are all entitled to have a bad day at the office. However, he was not given such indulgence; instead, he was promptly lynched in the media. Editors boycotted him, one by one his columns were dropped, and his income simply vanished. He had to sell his house, and he almost went bankrupt - all on the strength of one article.
Who would bother doing that again? Well, actually the BBC newsreader Michael Buerk did: only sort of. He didn't actually write an article on the power of women in the media, but was being interviewed in the Radio Times - and as anyone who has done an interview knows, in print journalism, the interviewer is the one who decides what appears on the page. Moreover, few of us (especially journalists, who are usually on the other side of the process) are clever enough to construct sentences as we talk which are not open to misconstruction, or which fully convey what we are trying to say.
Even allowing for that, his arguments were weak. "Almost all the big jobs in broadcasting were held by women - the controllers of BBC1 television and Radio 4 for example," he is quoted as saying. Good. So what about BBC 2, BBC3, and BBC 5, or the various ITV networks, or Channel 4, or Radios One, Two and Three? Who controls them? Martians? And then there was his attempt at humour - always a way of leaving open a flank for attack by the sisters. "What are the men left with? All they are is sperm donors, and most women aren't going to want an unemployable sperm donor loafing around and making the house look untidy. They are choosing not to have a male in the household." Instead of this being taken for what it was, a piece of fun at men's expense, it was taken as a literal statement of what he believes. And so of course, he has been torn limb from limb, though his observations about the traditional qualities of maleness - reticence, stoicism, single-mindedness - are surely worth more than the shrieks of derision and misrepresentation which they have earned to date.
"Look at the changes in the workplace," he added. "There is no manufacturing industry any more; there are no mines; few vital jobs require physical strength. We have lots of jobs that require people skills and multi-tasking - which women are a lot better at." Brenda Power reduced that to: "Buerk believes that women are stealthily and callously manipulating a society where physical force is being replaced by communication, empathy, initiative and tact." Yet he didn't say this: is it any wonder a feminist can win an argument, using such intellectually worthless rhetorical methods? And what can one say to her argument, which actually cited the stoning to death of women in certain countries as ammunition against poor Michael Buerk? Moreover, we have often seen feminists employing the kind of language which is denied the rest of us. "If men didn't want us to guess that they were useless, they should have made themselves more useful. Now they've been rumbled, all they can do is whinge," is the observation of that intellectual she-bear of feminism, Germaine Greer. And maybe boys do whinge these days: but girls sneer, as in Brenda Power's description of Michael Buerk as "a crotchety-looking newsreader".
Does she want to know what I feel about her appearance? Does it matter? Does the look on her face make any difference to the argument she's making? Would a male writer be allowed to refer to the nature of a woman's face if he was disagreeing with what she was saying? And if he did, would he not be lynched for doing so? Last weekend the Sunday Times illustrated the issue of female power in the media today by showing a picture of a confident young woman crushing two world globes, like testicles, in her hand.
No doubt it was thought to be amusing. But what newspaper would dare to present the opposite imagery, in which male power is - rather "entertainingly" - visually represented by a man violently and triumphantly abusing female genitalia?